Modafinil could enhance performance, they would strip the using athletes of their medals. Dinges said that it increases response time by no more than 10 milliseconds. For the committee, that was all they needed to hear.
Dinges couldn’t understand this contradictory decision. If the use of modafinil could result in such a consequence, why not treat caffeine users the same way? Caffeine, he said, does the exact same thing for response time.
The committee said that it wasn’t the same. Unlike modafinil, they couldn’t control caffeine. The Olympic stadium was filled with people using it.
Dinges shared this anecdote during his keynote speech at The Use and Biology of Energy Drinks: Current Knowledge and Critical Gaps, a conference held Thursday and Friday at the Neuroscience Center Building in Rockville, Md. to try to determine the extent of research into these kinds of drinks, which have come under increasing regulatory scrutiny of late.
The story outlined the general feeling of fellow scientists toward energy drinks: widely spread, hardly understood.
Dinges said that proof of the somewhat shallow understanding of caffeine can be exemplified by our daily routine. Why, he said, shortly after hours of sleep and restoring our body’s vitality, do we immediately reach for coffee?
The expansive panel of academics agreed that adolescents and children are prone to risk-taking behavior and are also most at risk by the effects of high caffeine doses.
read the full story here http://www.bevnet.com/news/2013/energy-drinks-conference-widely-spread-hardly-understood
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